The Toronado began life as something of an oddity in the General Motors lineup of the mid-Sixties. In price and plushness it was aimed at personal luxury coupes like Ford's Thunderbird. With a big block V-8 under the hood and swoopy styling, it was something of a high-performance grand tourer. The front-wheel drive setup and exotic instrument panel with a rotating drum speedometer marked it as something of a tech testbed.
Its first major restyling for the '71 model year moved it firmly into the "personal luxury coupe" camp, however, with the handwriting on the wall for hairy performance cars from Detroit.
By the '75 model year, like the Cameo White example in the photos, the Toronado now had all the latest NHTSA-mandated safety gear: front seat shoulder harnesses, 5-mph bumpers fore and aft, the works.
Under the hood was still a 455 cubic inch Olds Rocket V-8 driving the front wheels through a 3-speed Turbo-Hydramatic 425 automatic transmission, but compression had been reduced to 8.5:1 to keep it able to run on the regular unleaded fuel required by the catalytic converter now corking the exhaust. Even with a 4-barrel Rochester carburetor, output was down to 210 SAE net horsepower.
In addition to being front wheel drive, this '75 Toronado hints at some other future trends, like auxiliary high-mounted tail lamps, and one of Detroit's first available airbag systems.
Another Malaise Era feature was a simple "fuel economy gauge"... actually just a vacuum gauge ...on the dash. It would have been necessary with a car that got 11mpg City and 16 Hwy, especially since gas averaged $0.57/gallon, which is $3.34 in today's dough.
This photo was taken in April of 2016 with an iPhone 6S.
No comments:
Post a Comment